The Salvation Army had been founded in East London in 1865 by the self-styled ‘General’ William Booth and his wife, Catherine. It was an evangelical, working-class Christian movement that focused on social reform. During Robert’s childhood ‘Sally Army’ bands had paraded the streets of West Ham with their drums and trumpets, blasting out the joy of salvation, while the Army missions offered practical help to the poor. Booth had established the colony on the Essex badlands in 1891, in the hope that it would help to solve two apparent problems of the day: the fragility of the overstretched Empire and the physical decline of the urban working class. In 1910 the novelist Henry Rider Haggard explained in his book Regeneration that as Booth had become acquainted with the histories of the destitute men on the streets of London, he realised ‘how closely a great proportion of human sin is connected with wretched surroundings’. To attempt ‘not only the regeneration of the individual, but also of his circumstances’, Booth proposed to take wrecked men out of the urban slums, restore them to health and productivity, and then ship them out to people the wilds of Canada and New Zealand. In this way, the teeming city would be relieved of its tramps and wastrels, and the empty imperial outposts filled up with fresh colonists. Booth’s project gained extra urgency in the wake of the Boer War: in 1899 it had emerged that 8,000 of the 11,000 Mancunians who volunteered for service in South Africa were so physically feeble as to be unfit for service. ‘Back again to the garden!’ urged the general.
About 200 men were living in the Hadleigh colony in 1912, many of them derelict alcoholics picked up from the streets of London. All were unemployed. ‘We came down in a farm wagon,’ recalled one colonist, ‘half a dozen lads from the train, and there it was, smooth in the morning light, and the castle standing on the highest part like it was watching still over the fields. I was going to stay here! No foggy smoke, no screeching noise, and no more shivering and standing idle in the bitter wind and rain and sleet at a dockyard gate.’ Most of the residents were eventually discharged to paid work or to a colony overseas. Within a fortnight of Robert’s arrival, forty-two men – almost a quarter of the Hadleigh population – were despatched to Canada.
At Hadleigh, Robert slowly accustomed himself to a degree of freedom. There were no locks or bolts on the bedroom doors, no walls around the estate. He worked again in a tailor’s shop, on the main parade of buildings along the dirt track known as Castle Avenue. Other colonists made bricks, grew fruit or tended the colony’s poultry. Several million bricks, marked with the initials SALIC (Salvation Army Land and Industrial Colony), were carried by barge to London each year: the Bricks I site produced a red, wire-cut brick suitable for bridge- and sewer-building; Bricks II turned out the yellow brick that was used in ordinary terraces such as Cave Road; and the kilns of Bricks III fired a superior red brick, suitable for the construction of villas. The extensive market gardens grew mint for sale in London and rhubarb for Southend. The tomato houses and orchards produced tons of fruit for local markets. The poultry were the pride of the colony: Hadleigh’s fancy fowl often won prizes in national competitions. As at Broadmoor, most of the men also farmed their own allotments, which was considered good training for those who would emigrate and live off the land. General Booth’s emphasis on the garden had a moral charge: to tend to a plot implied a taming of one’s own nature, a process of self-civilisation exemplified in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel The Secret Garden (1911), in which the renewal of a wild and ruined garden transforms a sour girl and a hysterical boy into loving, fit and happy children.
Religious services were held in a corrugated-iron hall on Castle Avenue, known as the Citadel. These could be intense and noisy events, especially when a colonist experienced a revelation and knelt at the Citadel’s wooden seat to repent his sins and pledge himself to God. The atmosphere owed more to the exuberant, heady spirit of the music-hall than to the restrained rituals of the Anglican Church. General Booth liked to cite Psalm 98: ‘With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the Lord, the King.’ More than fifty musicians played with the Hadleigh colony’s renowned brass band.
To begin with, Robert was provided only with basic board and lodging but he was soon rewarded for his work with tokens to spend within the colony, and later with a few shillings’ pay a week. In the summer of 1912 he wrote to the chief steward at Broadmoor to request that he forward him some of the credit that he still held at the asylum: five shillings was sent to Robert in June, another fifteen in July.
Robert’s bedding and dining arrangements improved over time. The seaweed mattress and rough covers with which he was first issued were replaced with a firmer mattress and softer blankets. He was promoted from the first section of the refreshment rooms, where he sat on a bench at a bare table and fetched his food from a bar, to the second section, where he was served by a waiter, and then to a third, in which he sat on a chair at a table dressed with a white cloth and was brought thinly sliced meat on white crockery.
The longer-standing residents of Hadleigh were moved from dormitories to individual rooms in one of the colony’s farmhouses. By June 1912, Robert had been given a room in Castle House, an eighteenth-century building overlooking the castle ruins. He could see the tall chimney of Southend electric power station to the east, where the Thames opened into the sea, and the long stretch of Southend pier.
After Emily Coombes’s murder, Robert’s father had moved out of the house at Cave Road and taken lodgings in the Barking Road. He was back at work on the SS France within weeks of the Old Bailey trial but on his return from New York in November found time to visit his son in Broadmoor. The next year the National Line sold both the France and the England, as Coombes had feared, and he had to find work as a steward with other companies. In 1903 he married a twenty-three-year-old barmaid called Ada White, a dock foreman’s daughter who worked in the Ordnance Arms pub in the Barking Road. In the summer of 1912, she fell ill with pneumonia while he was at sea. She died in their house in East Ham in July, with one of her husband’s sisters at her side.
John Fox returned to anonymity after his acquittal, and seems to have died or emigrated by the end of the century. His friend and protector John Lawrence died in 1898 in a vast new lunatic asylum in Woodford, Essex. Fox and Robert’s solicitor Charlie Sharman was declared bankrupt in 1896 and he was suspended from practice when it emerged that he had been stealing from his clients. The next year he was charged with sexually assaulting another of his clerks – the case was heard by his friend Ernest Baggallay, who immediately dismissed it. By 1912 Sharman was again working as a lawyer. He subsequently developed a sideline in organised crime, selling stolen bonds on behalf of an international gang of mailbag thieves.
Both of Robert’s grandmothers had died by 1912: Mary Coombes in Bow in 1900, leaving about £1,000 to be shared between her five children, and Tryphena Allen in Liverpool in 1904. Robert’s aunt Emily had been widowed, while his uncle Frederick, who had accompanied him on the voyage to New York, had married, had a child, and set up as a grocer in Clerkenwell. Robert’s aunt Mary Macy, who had taken charge of Nattie, was still living in Liverpool. Her husband had died in a home for retired seamen in Staten Island, New York, and two of her five children had emigrated to Australia.
There is no record of whether Nattie visited Robert in Broadmoor, and Nattie’s job, like his father’s, had made it impossible for him to offer to look after Robert upon his discharge, but the brothers met after Robert left the asylum. Nattie remained the smaller of the two: he stood at five feet two inches, while Robert had grown to just over five feet seven inches tall. Nattie’s hair had darkened to black and his eyes to grey, whereas Robert’s hair was still brown and his eyes blue.
Nattie had become a ship’s stoker, first with the Merchant Navy, sailing between England and Australia, and from 1904 with the Royal Navy, sailing with the Home Fleet from Chatham in Kent. Stokers performed the most gruelling of shipboard duties, tending to the fires and furnaces that powered a steamer’s engine. Th
e stoker was ‘the lowest class of sailorman’, reported Robert Machray in The Night Side of London: ‘his work brutalises him; the heat in the interior of the steamboats drives him mad’. The stoke hole that contained the furnaces was hot, shiny, slick with oil; its cranks whirled and its pumps pulsed to propel the shafts that turned the ship’s screws. The stokers – stripped to the waist, black with coal, a film of pale ash sticking to their sweat-beaded skin – averted their heads from the spit and flare of fire and steam as they opened the furnace doors. Their hands blistered in the heat; their eyes tingled and smarted. By 1912 Nattie had been scarred above his left eyebrow and on the back of his right forearm. The stokers ‘come and go in the blazing light and half gloom’, observed the authors of Ocean Steamships, ‘like nightmares from fantastic tales of demonology’.
In June 1913, Robert and Nattie’s twice-widowed father fell ill on board the Rossano, the cargo ship on which he was serving as chief steward. He was put ashore on 2 July at Puerto de la Luz, a coaling port on the island of Las Palmas, off the Atlantic coast of Africa, and was admitted to the town’s Queen Victoria hospital. On 6 July, the day before his sixty-ninth birthday, he died of cancer.
Nattie was halfway across the Atlantic in July 1913. He had been lent by the Royal Navy to the recently established Royal Australian Navy in January, and in June had been appointed to serve as a leading stoker on its flagship, the HMAS Australia. The Australia was a giant battlecruiser that consumed coal at a tremendous rate: to run her at full speed, fifty stokers had to keep feeding the furnaces hard. When she stopped to refuel at the Caribbean island of St Vincent on her maiden voyage that August, it took twenty hours for the whole crew to load 2,000 tons of coal through manholes in the deck. ‘I have been down many coal mines,’ remarked the ship’s padre after visiting the stoke hole, ‘and preached considerable about hell, but I never saw anything equal to this yet.’ The ship reached Sydney in September, and in October 1913 led the fledgling Australian fleet in a ceremonial procession into the harbour. The largest warship in the southern hemisphere, the Australia toured the country for the next few months, being greeted with excitement wherever she docked. The coming of the Australian fleet was hailed by the defence minister as the most memorable event in the continent’s history since the arrival of Captain Cook.
A week after Nattie reached Sydney, Robert travelled from Hadleigh to the Probate Office in London to execute his father’s will. Because their stepmother had died, he and Nattie were the heirs to the £186 in the estate. Though not rich, they were now men of moderate means.
Back at Hadleigh, Robert got permission to leave the colony and follow Nattie to the Antipodes. He sailed on 2 January 1914 from Gravesend in Kent on the Royal Mail steamer Otranto, as one of about 400 third-class passengers. When asked for his next of kin, he provided the name and address of Charles Pike, the master tailor and supervisor at Broadmoor. He gave his own occupation as ‘tailor’.
This was the first sea voyage that Robert had made since his trip to New York with his father when he was thirteen. The ship steamed down the widening reaches of the river, the Essex marshes falling away to the left, the Kentish hills to the right. She sailed out to the Atlantic and then into the Mediterranean, stopping to collect and deposit mail and passengers at Gibraltar, off the Spanish coast, at Toulon in France, at Taranto in Italy and at Port Said in Egypt before passing through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. At Colombo in Ceylon a touring Australian cricket team boarded the vessel for the last leg of the voyage. Passengers of all classes played sports and games on deck and attended a fancy-dress ball.
After six weeks at sea Robert disembarked in Sydney. The city was the capital of New South Wales, one of the six Australian territories that in 1901 had joined together as a commonwealth of federated states. Since federation, some 400,000 Britons had emigrated to Australia, swelling its population to almost five million.
Nattie had lodgings in Newcastle, a hundred miles north of Sydney. Robert took the train 550 miles south-west to Melbourne in Victoria. He found work there as a clerk.
17
SUCH A HELL OF A NOISE
When war broke out in August 1914, the Australian prime minister promised Britain an army of 20,000: ‘While the Empire is at war,’ he said, ‘so is Australia.’ Robert Coombes travelled back up to Sydney from Melbourne to volunteer for service. By the time he joined up in September, the number of soldiers in the new Australian Imperial Force had already exceeded the total that the prime minister had pledged. About a quarter of the men in the AIF were British-born.
The army offered Robert a form of stability – after nine months of civilian life, he regained the structures and certainties of an institution – and the pay was good. Australian privates earned six shillings a day, more than any other Allied troops; they were sometimes referred to by the British, who earned a single shilling a day, as the ‘Six-Bob Tourists’. The coming of war also gave Robert a chance to embark on the voyages of adventure of which he had dreamt as a boy.
Over the last three months of 1914 Robert trained in a series of camps in south-eastern Australia, taking part in parades, drills, route marches, physical jerks for up to sixteen hours a day. He was taught to turn in formation, to stand to attention, to form fours. In the absence of uniform, he and his fellow soldiers drilled in shirtsleeves or singlets, dungarees and white hats. They slept twenty-three to a ten-man tent. The diet, everywhere, was meat stew, bread and jam.
Robert was assigned to the 13th Battalion, which was composed mostly of men from New South Wales and was one of four battalions in the 4th Infantry Brigade. Though the men of the 13th were a various lot – among them accountants and labourers, bushmen and clergymen – they gained a reputation as sturdy, independent types; strapping country lads with a breezy disdain for authority. In the ‘Battalion of Big Men’, Robert cut a slight figure: he weighed a little over eleven stone and his chest measured thirty-four inches, the minimum required in the early days of the war. He needed spectacles to correct the vision in his left eye. At thirty-two, he was older than most of his comrades; but, having spent so long in Broadmoor, he was also far less worldly. He had acquired a reserved, educated manner among the gentleman lunatics of Block 2. He knew little of drink or money, and in two decades had barely spoken to a woman.
When the uniform for the extra troops arrived, Robert was issued with boots, puttees, cord breeches, a grey collarless shirt made of Merino wool, a loose khaki jacket and a felt ‘slouch’ hat, its brim turned up on one side. Each tip of the jacket collar was adorned with a badge of a rising sun, the emblem of the AIF.
In October, the 13th Battalion formed a military band. Since there were no official bands in the AIF, the unit had to obtain its own instruments and sheet music and to draw musicians from the ranks. The 13th was lucky: a Miss Margaret Harris of Sydney donated the instruments and the commanders were able to find good performers among the troops. Robert was one of about twenty-eight men selected from the 900-odd in the battalion. He was provided with a cornet, the instrument that usually carried the main melody in a military band piece; it could produce a rich, mellow sound, warmer, rounder and more lyrical than the piercing bright notes of the trumpet.
On 22 December the band marched through Melbourne at the head of the 13th and played the battalion on to the HMAT Ulysses, the flagship of a fleet carrying some 12,000 Australian and New Zealand soldiers to war. During the six-week voyage to the training camps in Egypt, the band rehearsed daily. On the troop deck or in the officers’ mess each evening, it played ragtime tunes, British army staples such as ‘It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary’ and waltzes such as ‘Dancing by the Moon’ and ‘Pink Lady’. A favourite number was ‘Australia Will Be There’, a new song that both promised the nation’s allegiance to Britain and asserted its independent identity. The bandmaster had arranged for the music to be printed just before the Ulysses sailed, and the battalion band popularised the anthem throughout the AIF.
‘Our
band is improving wonderfully,’ Private Byron Hobson of the 13th Battalion confided to his diary. ‘The band played on our troop deck last night,’ he wrote on New Year’s Eve, ‘and we had a fine time ragging and dancing. . . I have never heard such a hell of a noise before.’
The regime on the Ulysses was relaxed and the atmosphere irreverent. The soldiers wore dungarees, padded about barefoot, sunbathed, read books, played cards and chess. To while away the days at sea, the 13th and the 14th, a sister battalion raised in Queensland, held a bun-eating competition, a cricket match (won by Robert’s battalion team) and a blind boxing match (a bloody affair, also won by the 13th). Yet the passage was slow and the diet of stew monotonous, and though Robert was used to a circumscribed life some of his companions rebelled against the constraints. When the ship docked near Colombo in mid-January a group of men (mostly of the 14th Battalion) escaped into town on small craft, got deliriously drunk and ran naked through the streets, mauling women. Back on board the ship, the language became so blue as the weeks passed that the minister warned the troops that they would be ostracised from polite society if they persisted in using the ‘Australian adjective’ (bloody). In another sermon, he reflected aloud on how Man lived from moment to moment, not knowing what the next day would bring – ‘Stew!’ hollered the congregation.
Even the music had started to grate on some. ‘I only realised tonight what getting too much of a good thing meant,’ reported the nineteen-year-old Private Eric Susman on 25 January, after a very hot afternoon on the Red Sea. ‘We have all been interested in our brass band, and have listened to it day by day, and have appreciated its continuing proficiency. But now, the continual blare is becoming boring and nerve-racking. We get too much of it, too many marches and “patriotic selections”. Anything for a comic opera selection, or a tango dance played by a string band!’